Archive for April, 2011

Satellite image captured the destruction of a EF4 tornado that hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama and other areas of the South on Wednesday April 27th. The tornado had a maximum width of half a mile and a path length of 2.82 miles.The death toll keeps rising with over 340 claimed dead. The twister alone may register as the most powerful long-track tornado in US history.

A series of tornadoes hit the South this week traveling in excess of 220 miles across Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Approximately 211 tornadoes were reported within a few hours’ span on Wednesday, including a series of so-called long-track twisters that raked across six states.

National Weather Service confirmed that an EF-5 tornado with winds up to 205 mph struck the city of Smithville Wednesday afternoon. The first EF-5 tornado to hit Mississippi since March 1966. EF-5 tornadoes being the most deadliest.

ALOS the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, renamed “Daichi” operated by JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) shifted its operation mode to the low load mode due to power generation precipitation on April 22, 2011 around 7:30 am.

The ALOS satellite onboard observation devices were found turned off. The satellite seems to have exceeded its life after five years. The power generation has been rapidly deteriorating, and cannot currently confirm power generation.

The ALOS was launched on January 24, 2006 from the Tanegashima Space Center. The satellite has three remote-sensing instruments: the Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) for digital elevation mapping (DEM’s), the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2) for precise land coverage observation, and the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) for day-and-night and all-weather land observation and enables precise land coverage observation and can collect enough data by itself for mapping on a scale of 25,000:1 without relying on points of reference on the ground.